2No. 10
March: Pocket Size 1TB HHDs Become Commonplace
Toshiba, Seagate, WD and Iomega all came out with disk drives with capacities reaching 1 TB and above in 2010. Many of the devices can fit in a breast pocket.
3No. 9
June: WD Passes Seagate, Now No. 1 in HHD Shipments
Western Digital, which now prefers to be called WD, for the first timein years moved past perennial market champion Seagate Technology into first place in number of hard drives sold during one quarter.
4No. 8
December: Dell Acquires Compellent for $960M
In September, Dell lost a bidding war to Hewlett-Packard for scale-out storage maker 3PAR; HP paid $2.3 billion. But that opened the door for Dell to later acquire Compellent, another progressive company with excellent products—for less than half that price.
5No. 7
April: HP Labs Reports Breakthroughs in Memristor Chip Research
A memristor, basically a resistor with memory,has more capabilities than anybody knew. HP Labs reports finding that a memristor can perform logic, potentially enabling computation to be performed in chips where data is stored. This could mean a radical change in the way computer systems are designed and built.
6No. 6
February: Intel, Micron Ship First 20nm-class NAND Flash
The new 25-nanometer, 2-bit-per-cell chip from Intel and Micron Technology can hold 8GB of data storage, more than 10 times the 700MB capacity of a standard CD. The chip measures a mere 167 square millimeters, making it small enough to fit through the hole in the middle of a CD.
7No. 5
September: HP Outbids Dell for 3PAR, Pays $2.3 Billion
HP got a solid, high-quality company with loyal customers in 3PAR. But it had to pay twice as much as it originally thought, due to the bidding war it waged with Dell. For its trouble, Dell received a $72 million “break-up fee” from 3PAR upon the termination ofthe merger agreement they signedin August.
8No. 4
October: WD Ships First 3TB Hard Disk Drive
9No. 3
November: Symantec Survey Finds Only 20% of Business Data Is Properly Protected
Data storage and protection provider Symantec revealed in its annual disaster recovery survey that only about 20 percent of IT managers are using replication and failover technologies to protect mission-critical data in virtual environments.
10No. 2
November: iPad, Smartphone Sales Fire Up NAND Flash Business
Revenue for NAND flash memory in 2010 is now expected to reach $18.7 billion, up 38 percent from last years $13.5 billion.
11No. 1
January: Oracle Finally Closes $7.4B Sun Microsystems Deal
After nine months of jumping through legal hoops, Oracle closed its $7.4 billion deal to buy Sun Microsystems in the year’s largest IT acquisition. Oracle now becomes a major player in the data storage sector.